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Contact Center Solutions Week in Review

Happy Fourth of July holiday to U.S. enthusiasts of the Contact Center Solutions Community, and a happy weekend to everyone else. The fact that this is a short week in the U.S. does not mean that there was a shortage of interesting developments this past week in the community. In fact, quite the contrary happens to be the case.

Next, you might wish to look at my observations on the question as to whether your organization needs a customer experience C-level. This has been a subject of much discussion, along with the fact that such positions are now one of the fastest growing ones in organizations around the world. And, while the answer to the question is yes, it comes with significant qualifications since appointing such an individual without CEO support and having them vested with authority and accountability can be dangerous to your corporate health.

And, speaking of customer experiences, you should find the posting on how and why insurance company Legal & General has decided to train its Insurance Customer Service Division’s 1,300 employees in what is calling customer empathy and engagement.

This week also saw two different items on social media and its impact on customer service. The first item highlighted the fact that business that have used social media to be more responsive when engaging their customers have seen positive impacts. The second item dealt with a survey done of U.K. retailers that highlighted why investing in omni-channel channels is great but making sure they are increasing agent responsiveness and providing a consistent user experience is paramount and in the U.K. this is not being done well.

The previous item is also a good companion piece to one done by ContactCenterSolutions Contributing writer Lavanya Rathnam on how implementation of a sound customer experience management (CEM) solution can have significant impacts on improving customer loyalty.

The rest of the news this week as usual was a mixture of people and even places on the move, new capabilities and delighted customers. Places moving include Voxware, which is moving its U.K. offices to London in response growing customer interest in cloud-based voice management solutions. On the people front, in our Comings & Goings we noted that contact center solution provider VOX Network Solutions recently appointed industry veteran Chanley Geveshausen director of contact center solutions.

In other industry news:

Speech recognition has become an increasingly integral part of customer interactions on both sides of the conversation, especially as we move to an omni-channel world. It is way the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office (USTPO) award of a patent to NovoSpeech for its Quantum Search Application for improving handheld device speech recognition is noteworthy.

As the need for contact center solutions employees to be more mobile and still have access to all of the tools they need increases, solutions that enable more mobility and agility are starting to proliferate including the announcement this week of Twilio making Chromebooks contact center friendly.

Mplsystems’s next generation customer engagement solution has been a significant benefit to SENSILAB, a homeopathic health products company.

StrongView unveils new contextual marketing features in its Marketing Cloud which are designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of outbound campaigns.

Finally, as quality of interaction is a key performance indicator (KPI) that should matter, it should be an item of more than passing interest that SpeechStorm and Cyara have collaborated to produce S-Connect for testing customer experience. The solutions leverages the power and capabilities of the speech-enabled IVR capabilities in SpeechStorm’s environment, and imports generated test cases directly into the Cyara platform for testing. .